


50: Miniature Dino (A-11)

by factorielle



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Arc: Greed Island, Cold, Gen, Slice of Life, Ugly Sweaters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 21:37:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1111789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/factorielle/pseuds/factorielle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Killua's opinion of Ging varies from one day to the next, but this time, he's definitely sure the guy is out to hurt him deep in what little soul he has. (Ugly sweaters and life-threatening situations.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	50: Miniature Dino (A-11)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ArlenMaur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArlenMaur/gifts).



> For the 2013 HxH Secret Santa at [hohohohunters](http://hohohohunters.tumblr.com/).

“No,” Killua repeated, scrambling for steadiness in the face of his impending doom. He unconsciously took another step back, and found himself hitting the side of the mountain; leaving him, quite literally, with his back against the wall.

“There’s no other way,” Bisky replied quietly. Easy for her to say, when the thing she was making no effort to protect him from was an atrocity that had turned his stomach at twenty paces. Its shade of green, which Killua had never found particularly objectionable on Gon, was now the most hideous thing he’d ever seen. And that was without even counting the white fur lining and the pseudo-friendly face that became more and more sinister the longer he looked at it. The eyes hadn’t looked away from him all this time.

“I don’t want it,” he tried again, hopeless even as he dodged the thing for the third time. “I’ve trained for extreme conditions my entire life, it’s not going to make a diff—”

“Every single person we’ve talked to told us that everyone who ever went in there has died of hypothermia. Therefore, to go get the card, you need to wrap up.” It sounded sensible, but that was the problem with her: she made anything sound sensible, and it could take days before a glimmer of a thought perked up that said _wait_ —

Even the green monstrosity that Gon had been trying to force on him for the past five minutes was beginning to sound like a reasonable option. But he could still fight. He could keep winning. He was still stronger than Gon, still faster, and he would not go down. There may not have been much Zoldyck pride left in him, but he still had a sense of style, and he wasn't going to wear a fluffy sweater with an animal’s face on it just because the townspeople in a video game said so.

“It’s suspicious,” he tried to argue, keeping a steady three meters between himself and Gon. “It’s a beach town, the temperature never goes below 22°C, why do they even have sweaters to sell?”

And why did they have to be so hideous? He could barely look at Gon for the red and white stripes he was already wearing.

But even so, he could hear the pout when Gon finally spoke. “It’s a game,” he explained, eyes darting left and right, looking for an opening. Which he wasn’t going to find, because Killua did not _have_ openings. It was kind of insulting that Gon even looked. “You told me yourself, didn’t you? If the game is well made, we’ll always find the things we need around the place where we need them. So if they’re selling the sweaters, doesn’t that mean it’s important that we wear them?”

Only it wasn’t just the sweaters. They’d been the most immediately offensive, but there was the rest of the attire too: heavy velvet pants, fur-lined boots, down jackets, and then the accessories: hats and gloves and scarves, each and every one of which Killua would have happily walked the world to find a fire to throw them into.

Instead, he now had a choice between putting his own expertise on video games in question, or suggesting that Ging’s creation was possibly not the most awesome thing that had ever graced this planet.

Dammit.

“Then why isn’t _she_ wearing one?” he diverted, pointing to their master even as he dodged Gon’s next assault.

The hag shrugged. “I don’t like the cold. Besides, they only had two sets.” She tilted her head, eyebrows raised. “Or are you going to let Gon go in there alone?”

Under the direst of tortures, Killua would have sworn that it was her Nen that made him freeze, some sort of special ability that he couldn’t possibly have avoided; not, of course, the realization that she had him completely figured out.

Whatever it was, it lasted long enough for Gon to take advantage.

* * *

Bisky’s last piece of advice was that when they came back, they'd easily find her sipping rainbow-colored cocktails on the beach. As Killua took the first step into the tunnel, he could have sworn she was laughing. At him, specifically.

“It’s not so bad after all, is it?” Gon offered after a while, with the joy and innocence of someone who had no notion that he looked like he’d been regurgitated by a colorblind peacock. “They’re comfy. And our size.”

Which only made it more suspicious that those would be the only sets available at the store (that otherwise sold surfboards and swim trunks), but Killua didn’t comment. He’d lost that fight already, no point in going back to it.

“At least we’re in the dark,” he conceded, although it wasn’t entirely true. They'd long since left daylight behind, but so far they’d had no need for the torches. The walls, for all that they looked made of stone, provided an eerie glow that was objectively dim but plenty good enough for them to follow into the depth of the mountain, now that their eyes had adjusted.

The path sloped and curved into what seemed to be a downward spiral with no end in sight, eerily reminiscent of the Devil's Stairway. Still, it was a couple of hours of the most boring walk imaginable before he mentioned it. “In my country there’s a legend about something like this,” he said. “About a staircase that goes all the way down to the underworld. Anyone who manages to go all the way down can choose someone’s spirit to bring back.” Of course, in the legend, the temperature rose as you went down, which was very much not the case here. Killua had been trained to endure extreme exposure, but even so and despite the ridiculous attire he’d been forced into, he could feel the cold begin to seep in, curling against his skin. If this went on much longer, he might have to admit that it was a good thing he was dressed for the occasion.

“Did you ever find it?” Gon asked, because of course wondering if such a thing _existed_ wasn't quite as interesting.

“Well. By the time my grandfather was born, every version of the legend placed the entrance on Kukuroo Mountain.”

“Ah! And that’s why your family settled there, right? To make sure nobody could come back up? I remember now, Coco-chan mentioned it on the bus.”

Who the hell was Coco-chan? Killua shrugged. “That’s the legend. When my great-grandmother died, my brother convinced me that we’d built the mansion on top of them, and showed me the staircase.”

“So you went down?”

“I’m telling the story!” Killua chided. But of course he’d gone down. The old woman had been a never-ending source of sweets, available even when his mother sent him to bed without dinner. All he’d understood when she died was that there would be no more candy, and the notion was unbearable. “I got lost in the dungeons for two days,” he admitted. There was more to the story, but nothing that showed him in his best light: there had been rats, and creaky doors that slammed themselves shut behind him, and some hours spent curled in a corner, trying to recover a little strength so he could go on.

He'd been four years old and nobody had come for him, but now that he thought about it, he’d felt a rush of energy a couple of times, something sweeping through him, there and gone the next moment. Someone’s En checking in on him, he realized now. They’d left him to find his way in the caves that crisscrossed the inside of Kukuroo Mountain, but he hadn’t really entirely abandoned.

“And then what happened?” Gon asked, and Killua realized he’d fallen into the kind of contemplative silence that inevitably ended up with Gon poking him out of it.

“Then I finally found my way back and got a lecture from my mother about making her worry,” he said, grimacing at the thought. “Then one from my dad about listening to everything my brother said. Then one from my other brother about the inevitability of death and how there was no way to bring someone back.”

“Hmm,” Gon said.

The light reflected by the tunnel’s wall was getting brighter. Here and there Killua could see carvings, patterns he couldn’t decipher but that reminded him of the inside of their rings.

“I think I’d try anyway,” Gon told him, just as Killua was wondering whether Bisky was planning on teaching them Nen writing. It could come in handy, even if it looked like it’d take a long time to set up.

He frowned, vaguely aware that he’d lost track of the conversation at some point. “Try what?”

“If someone died. Someone important. I think I’d do everything to bring them back, even if it looked impossible.”

No question about that. Killua could never quite figure out if that tenacity was one of Gon’s best or worst traits. Probably both.

“Besides,” Gon continued, “if you’re with me, I feel that I can do anything.”

“Cut it out,” Killua said, instead of _what if it’s me?_ “It’s embarrassing. And just so you know, if such a stairway exists, the entrance isn’t in the Zoldyck mansion. It’s nothing but rats and spiders down the-”

He stopped, because Gon had stopped, in the entrance of a cavern that looked way too big to fit under the mountain they’d entered.

That was Killua’s first observation, and he regretted it immediately. The size wasn’t what mattered here: more important was the ice, everywhere: lining the walls and the distant ceiling; reflecting the mysterious light source in glittering rainbows. The path they’d been following continued, also made of ice, apparently solid but propped up on nothing but faith and improbable engineering. Below them were more walls of ice, going down, down, further than Killua could see. He was pretty sure that the walls weren’t impossible to scale, but there was a strong sense that the fall itself was deadly.

“Pretty,” Gon said, eyes wide and bright, and of course he’d think so instead of noticing the overly pointy stalactites that descended from the ceiling, some of them larger than a grown man and looming above the winding path.

“Yes, yes. Let’s go already, it’s cold in here.” Possibly the understatement of the year. At some point he’d even started to shiver. Cocktails on the beach sounded pretty good right about now.

Gon grinned. “Aren’t you glad you wore the sweater after all?”

“No, I’m not,” Killua grouched back, following a few steps behind, looking for the traps. Bisky hadn’t been able to tell them which card was hidden in here, but considering the alleged deaths this place had caused, it was probably A or higher. The temperature couldn’t possibly be the only danger here.

And yet.

Nothing happened as they made their way to the center. They passed the stalactites without a problem, as well as the huge boulders that seemed held back by nothing but measly bumps of ice on the floor.

Nothing and nothing and nothing, until they finally reached the altar in the center and Killua was shivering with anticipation.

And cold. The cold was definitely a thing by this point.

“It’s a dinosaur!” Gon called excitedly, and there was no other word for it: on the altar was a miniature ecosystem, a tiny mountain and stream coming down from it, and, wandering among the miniature trees, an equally tiny dinosaur. “I guess that’s what we’re looking for, right? The hand-riding mermaid was the same size.”

“Yeah,” Killua said, still looking for the trap that had to be there. “But wai—”

The light, wherever it had been coming from, was suddenly turned off, just as a deep rumbling noise started echoing through the cave.

“Woops,” Gon said, and, because he had no sense of priorities, “Book!”

The race that followed was everything Killua had expected: dodging projectiles and outrunning boulders on a narrow and fragile path with emptiness on either side, only lit with the small torches they’d at least had the foresight to bring.  

On the last stretch before the tunnel Killua found the ground creaking under his feet and accelerated, confident that Gon was right behind him.

Only not quite, and when he turned back after reaching solid ground there was Gon still too far away, using the last of the crumbling path as leverage to jump in his direction.

Killua caught him by the wrist, felt the shock of Gon slamming into the wall below, and breathed. Pulling him up wasn’t difficult, none of the production they made of it in the few adventure movies he’d watched, but the gloves made for a bad grip and the ice was slippery enough that the operation wasn’t quite as graceful as it might have been, and Gon toppled on top of him, heavy and warm and phenomenally alive.

And grinning, because having narrowly escaped death did that to him.

Killua rolled his eyes. “Next time I tell you to wait,” he said grouchily, refusing to acknowledge that his arms had automatically wrapped around Gon, “ _wait_.” It was warm like this. He sort of didn’t want to move.

“We got the card, though. Everything ended up okay, since you were here with me."

 _Do you really have to keep saying things like that,_ Killua thought, but didn't ask aloud. Of course he had to. Just like he had to claim he'd punch Hisoka in the face or find the most elusive Hunter in three generations or discover mythical stairways that'd allow him to defy death. That was just Gon all over, and that was why--

That was why.

"I'm still going to make you pay for making me wear that sweater," Killua told him, and, protected by the darkness, allowed himself to squeeze a little tighter.


End file.
